Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors: Striking a balance for the coach

Envision an Olympic gymnast poised on the balance beam, every eye in the arena focused on her as she prepares to execute her next move—striking a delicate balance between grace and precision. From the sidelines, the coach watches intently, just as invested as the athlete herself, if not more so, hoping to see their hard work come to fruition. Whether it's little league baseball or Olympic-level gymnastics, the role of a coach is undeniably challenging. With the world currently captivated by the Olympics, the spotlight is on the athletes and their remarkable performances. Yet, behind every successful athlete is a coach orchestrating their journey, navigating the pressures of revealing stats, instant replays, and the cheers of enthusiastic fans.

This focus on coaching excellence mirrors the dynamics within contact centers, where supervisors work tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure optimal customer experience and agent performance. Yet the feedback focus is firmly on empowering customer-facing agents and meeting the ever-evolving needs of clients.

An increasing range of AI tools is geared toward assisting the team, that is, reinforcing the work of the agents – and gaining a deeper understanding of the game, the customer habits, preferences, concerns, sentiments, aspirations, etc. But what about supporting the work of supervisors?

These CX leaders are left to bridge the gap on their own between the drive towards strategic goals and the carrying out of day-to-day operations—essentially coaching alone. Caught between the demands of the organization’s upper management and the needs of their agents on the contact center floor, the supervisor can feel isolated and restricted in their ability to make a difference. And yet, if given the right tools, they can have a huge impact on the organization as a whole.

Enlighten Copilot can help them in their work as they lead the team to win.

Moving the goalposts: The evolving role of the supervisor

Traditionally, the role of contact center supervisors has been comparable to that of a taskmaster. It is their responsibility to oversee the carrying out of operational aspects, and generally make sure that agents are performing as they should. Rather than being agile, they tend to work reactively as issues emerge, running between agents, putting out fires.

The more complex the contact center environment becomes—take for example the rise of digital channels, or the increase in hybrid and remote working—the harder it is for supervisors to keep up, let alone find time to build the kind of relationships that can motivate agents, making sure they feel supported and, in doing so, reducing the high attrition rates that plague the industry. Little wonder that as many as 78% of supervisors agree that increased work stress is negatively impacting the customer experience their contact center is able to deliver.

Sitting on the sidelines: Too much of a good thing

In fact, there are new AI tools on the market that supervisors can use both to automate various routine tasks, and to gain new insights into agent performance that they've never had access to before. Leveraging customer and agent data to focus supervisor attention where it is most needed, such tools go a long way to streamlining their responsibilities and making them more efficient and effective.

However, having access to such a wealth of information can bring its own challenges. With so many insights to process, supervisors can become overly analytical, distracted by the detail, and unable to decide what next steps will lead their teams to success and have a strategic impact on the wider business. What’s more, being able to completely offload their operational tasks to an automated system can leave them disengaged from agents and their KPIs, instead of being specifically where they are needed in the heat of the moment to offer the very coaching, guidance and feedback required to achieve excellent customer experience.

Staying on the ball: Streamline and focus

Given how the majority of customer interactions flow through the contact center, supervisors are actually in a unique position to leverage all the available customer data, and become a strategic hub for the rest of the organization. Now, with NICE Enlighten Copilot, supervisors can achieve the perfect balance of operational tasks—receiving AI alerts to high-risk calls that need their attention, coaching agents etc.—and analytical decision making, knowing which insights to act on, and sharing them with other functions in the organization to help them perform at a truly strategic level.

For the first time ever, the power of AI can be used to turn interaction data into actionable insights that extend past just agent performance. They can understand supervisor impact—how real-time interventions by supervisors affect customer satisfaction. They will have insights into the value of different marketing campaigns or sales promotions crucial to sales and marketing analysis. They can better comprehend agent attrition—such as which indicators affect the agent’s likelihood to stay or leave the company—making their feedback critical to HR. They’ll also have feedback from Copilot for the legal department on risks coming in through the contact center as patterns and customer complaints which might otherwise go unnoticed. The result? Truly strategic supervisors who are not just AI enabled, but AI augmented.

Hitting it out of the park: Supervisor multiplier

Delivering both excellent interactions and operational efficiency, Copilot provides detailed, real-time data and alerts, such as calls with negative customer sentiment, or changes in agent state that require their attention that create a shift from reactive to proactive leadership. Simple conversational inquiries enable supervisors to engage with and act on data in a natural, streamlined way.

Leveraging gen AI to uncover trends and patterns, Copilot enables supervisors to mitigate risks to their teams’ tracked KPIs over time, providing interaction-based guidance to agents who are struggling, improving the overall performance of the broader call center team and enhancing the customer experience. This all serves to boost supervisor performance, and free them to carry out training and team building activities—not to mention tapping into their full customer experience expertise.

At the organizational level, Copilot proactively combines operations and strategy to meet KPIs and wow customers. Vital context on emerging trends enables management to act swiftly to prevent potential issue escalation, while aligning real-time, AI-backed interaction insights with the organization’s strategic goals, KPIs, and operational tactics.

Plain sailing: The way forward

Just as there is greater recognition today of the direct relationship between the agent experience and the customer experience – namely that when agents are properly supported, they do a better job at driving CX—so we must acknowledge that supervisors, too, are a vital link in the chain. For supervisors to be truly effective and satisfied in their work, their role must further evolve.

Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors redefines and elevates the supervisor’s role from operations taskmaster to organizational strategist—and coach extraordinaire. Providing AI-powered assistance, it makes supervisors more strategic by prioritizing real-time, proactive insights, delivered with context so that they can drive holistic recommendations that translate into better agent satisfaction, which in turn leads to enhanced customer satisfaction. In doing so, Copilot enables the broader organization to tap into supervisors’ full customer experience expertise, maximizing the impact they can have on the business as a whole.